Although increases in sedimentation have been proposed to interfere with benthic communities in many coastal areas worldwide, few experimental studies have investigated the effect of sedimentation on community composition and assessed species-specific responses. In a field experiment on a rocky shore on the Swedish east coast (northern Baltic Proper) we confirmed the hypotheses that ambient sedimentation influences macroalgal abundance and community composition, and that species-specific responses to sedimentation correlate with reproductive strategies. We followed the establishment and development of macroalgal vegetation on artificial substrates at 8-m and 15-m depth for 4.5 years while manipulating the depositional environment by regularly removing accumulated sediment. Sediment removal significantly favoured macroalgal development and vegetation cover. Responses of macroalgal species to the sediment treatments were clearly species-specific; for example, the ephemeral green algae (Cladophora glomerata and Enteromorpha spp.) were highly tolerant to sedimentation while belt-forming perennial brown algae (Fucus vesiculosus and Sphacelaria arctica) were not. Accordingly, multivariate analyses (redundancy analysis) showed that variance in species abundances were significantly correlated to sediment conditions. The effect of sediment removal was higher at 15-m than at 8-m depth and some species' distributions seemed limited in depth by the present sediment load (e.g. F. vesiculosus). Vegetative propagation was common in the study area and many species mainly depended on dispersal by fragmentation. Generally, species with an extended reproductive period, either by long continuous spore release (C. glomerata and Enteromorpha spp.) or vegetative dispersal by fragmentation (e.g. Furcellaria lumbricalis and Polysiphonia fucoides), were most tolerant to sedimentation. This paper demonstrates long-term effects of sediment deposition on the development of a macroalgal community over several growing seasons. The results indicate that variation in sediment loads is an important constraint for species' local distributions and abundances, and affects the composition of sublittoral rocky-shore macroalgal communities.

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for regularizing displacement fields in image registration. The method uses the local structure tensor and gradients of the displacement field to impose a local metric, which is then used optimizing a global cost function. The method allows for linear operators, such as tensors and differential operators modeling the underlying physical anatomy of the human body in medical images. The algorithm is tested using output from the Morphon image registration algorithm on MRI data as well as synthetic test data and the result is compared to the initial displacement field. The results clearly demonstrate the power of the method and the unique features brought forth through the global optimization approach.

Abstract:In image registration it is often necessary to employ regularization in one form or another to be able to find a plausible displacement field. In medical applications, it is useful to define different constraints for different areas of the data. For instance to measure if organs have moved as expected after a finished treatment. One common problem is how to find plausible motion vectors far away from known motion. This paper introduces a new method to build and solve a Global Linear Optimizations (GLO) problem with a novel set of terms which enable specification of border areas to allow a slipping motion. The GLO approach is important especially because it allows simultaneous incorporation of several different constraints using information from medical atlases such as localization and properties of organs. The power and validity of the method is demonstrated using two simple, but relevant 2D test images. Conceptual comparisons with previous methods are also made to highlight the contributions made in this paper.

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